Smce 1997 we have dressed in uniforms. Before this we dressed ourselves--paid for our own clothing. Now the state provides for us.

Here at Fluvanna we wear what are known as "burgundy scrubs." They are cotton and, I think, very comfortable. My only complaint is that when I wore jeans I could feel them tighten when I was over indulging and take the appropriate action: eat less. Now I can expand away and you would never know the extent of the mushrooming under the burgundy sack. There's no early warning system in the waistband.

If however, you were to stroll around the boulevard (the central courtyard) you would immediately see that a large number of women were not dressed in burgundy at all. There are the blue people. Not Dell computer guys, but women wearing blue scrubs. The blue designates that they are not yet classified. When inmates are classified, they are given their medical level, their mental health level, their security level, their good time level; they are given their place in the system. Once classified they can get a job or go to school or be transferred to another institution. Inmates in blue may also be coming out of segregation, or they could be patients of the psychiatric unit. In other words, blue people are non-functioning inmates.

If you were wandering about the courtyard, you would also notice that there is a large body of green people. These are workforce inmates. Not that every inmate who has a job wears a green uniform. The people who work outside (not all the way outside, they are the orange people) wear green perhaps to blend with the grass. The people who work in the kitchen wear green perhaps to blend with the lettuce. And the people who work maintenance wear green perhaps to blend with the mold.

A recent development on the uniform front is that this year we must give up our colored T-shirts for gray T-shirts. Over the years the authorities have allowed us to buy our own colored T-shirt to wear under the scrubs (for layers of comfort and warmth--it can be very cold. In the winter, I wear a full set of sweats under my scrubs). Since we can only buy our T-shirts from a handful of authorized vendors and most of us do not have a lot of money to spend, we all end up buying the same T-shirts from the same places. The restrictions on the T-shirts created their own informal uniform. However now we will drop these and replace them with gray.

People are already feverishly searching out variations of gray: the JC Penny grays versus the Land's End gray. Me, I'm too lazy to figure all that stuff out. I'll buy my T-shirts all one gray. It's one less decision in the morning: what color T-shirt to wear today? Oh, I think it will be gray. Which gray? The gray gray.

I used to love beautiful clothes and shoes. My friends still tease me about the gorgeous (don't let them tell you they were ridiculous--they were fabulous) shoes I wore for years at Goochland. But as the years have trundled by and my clothes and shoes and stuff have dwindled and transformed into the dull and sensible, I have become more eccentric and natty and colorful on the inside. I used to want to blend in and now that I look and sound exactly like everyone else, I discover and perhaps appreciate for the first time, how incredibly individual we all are. The more we look alike, the more we dance to our own beat. (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, May 5, 2005)

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. This column is one of a series, published under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'